This book started out great. The first line, "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper." really hooked me. As the book continued it proved interesting, a tale narrated in the first person by a man of obvious derangement convinced of his own rationality and the fact that he is justified in any action taken towards furthering his own ends.

Cox does an excellent job of capturing the feel of a Victorian novel, and I think that may ultimately have been the problem. As the story continued for page after page I simply got too bogged down in the sheer Victorian-ness of it. Tiny details of little or no interest and constant digressions from the main plot as the narrator sees conspiracies against him in every corner and hidden meaning in every turn of phrase. Sheer number of pages or word count is not usually a huge impediment to me, but there just wasn't enough of a pay-off here for me to have any desire to continue.

Maybe someday I'll come back to this book and see if I'll find it any less of a slog, but this one was just too much for me when I first tried to tackle it.